NOTE: The following was submitted by former Senator
Hayakawa as his Statement to the Japanese American Evacuation Redress
Hearing on July 27, 1983. His
statement begins from page 417 of the JAER record.

Excerpts from a speech that appeared in the Congressional
Record, December 7, 1982

APPENDIX

ADDITIONAL SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD

PREPARED STATEMENT OF FORMER SENATOR S. I.
HAYAKAWA

Mr. President, I should like to remind my friends and colleagues that
today is December 7, the 41st anniversary of the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor.

Forty-one years ago today forces of the Empire of Japan attacked the
United States at Pearl Harbor. Less than 3 months later President
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Executive order that led to the
relocation and detention of some 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and
noncitizens in relocation centers.

In the four decades since that "day of infamy" we have destroyed our
powerful adversary and built her up to be a powerful friend -- so
powerful that we now plead with her to restrict the export of her
products.

In the four decades since the mutual hatreds of war, we have so healed
ourselves that we now have a prosperous, thriving Japanese-American
community which, despite its small population of about 600,000,
includes not one, not two, but three U.S. Senators. The ancestors of
these three men worshiped the Emperor. But these men stand in this
Chamber, the heart of our democracy, and when the spirit moves them,
freely criticize the President.

But one controversy has not subsided during the 41 years since
Pearl Harbor. If anything, it has grown. That is the controversy
over the relocation of Japanese-Americans.

In an effort to understand the issue, the Congress created a commission
to investigate the events surrounding the relocation and to make any
recommendations for redress. By law the commission must release its
findings in a report by December 30, 1982. According to several
newspaper reports, it will recommend compensation to those who were
interned of up to $25,000 per person.

Whether or how we shall compensate those interned is a matter for
future Congresses, of which I shall not be a Member. But as a U.S.
Senator, a Japanese-American, and especially as an American, I must
share my views on this most sensitive issue.

The wartime relocation of Japanese-Americans in 1942 can only be
understood in the context of California history. As is well known, California
has been the principal source of anti-Oriental propaganda in the
United States of more than 100 years. During the Gold Rush days, by
1851, there were 25,000 Chinese in the State. It was a regular practice
of miners, on a big Saturday night drunk, to raid the Chinese sections
of mining towns to beat up or lynch a few Chinese just for the hell of
it. Chinese were often the victims of mob violence. A mob of whites
shot and hanged 20 Chinese one night in Los Angeles in 1871.

When the first transcontinental railroad, the Central Pacific, was
completed, great ceremonies were held in connection with the hammering
in of the Golden Spike to celebrate the occasion. Eloquent speeches
were given praising the magnificent contributions of Englishmen,
Irishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, and others who had contributed to the
completion of the railroad. But no Chinese were invited to this
event, although they above all -- 10,000 of them -- had done the
most dangerous and demanding labor to make the completion possible. The
Chinese were dismissed when their work was done and set adrift without
severance pay.

Anti-Chinese legislation and the agitation were common throughout the
latter half of the 19th century and well into the 20th. The workers
discharged from the railroads drifted from town to town looking for
work. In San Francisco they entered some of the skilled trades like
hatmaking, cigarmaking, tailoring and so on. It is an interesting fact
that the first union label was one placed on cigars to tell the
customers that this cigar was made by white men and not by Chinese.
That is the proud origin of the union label. In 1882 the Chinese
Exclusion Act was passed after much agitation on the part of
Californians.

The persecution of the Chinese continued into the 20th century.
Chinese-American friends of mine who are now older professional men in
San Francisco remember the days when, if they left the Chinese area
they were beaten up by Irish and other toughs, so they had to stay
within the limits of Chinatown. Throughout this period, pamphlets and
books were published attacking Orientals as a menace to white society.

The Hearst newspapers continued to lead a crusade against the
"Yellow Peril." The Sacramento Bee, Fresno Bee, Modesto Bee -- all of the
McClatchy chain -- were notorious for their anti-Oriental
propaganda. I remember as a high school student in Winnipeg in the
early 1920's writing a term paper on anti-Oriental agitation in
California, and it was then that I learned of the McClatchy newspapers,
long before I knew where Sacramento, Modesto, and Fresno were.

The attacks upon Orientals were not limited to the popular press or to
labor unions and "patriotic" societies. It was highly endorsed by many
of the leading intellectuals of the time. There were such books as
Lothrop Stoddard's "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World
Supremacy" (1920). Other distinguished intellectuals who wrote warning
books against the Orientals were people like Madison Grant, who wrote
"Passing of the Great Race, or Racial Basis of European History"
(1916). There was also the distinguished labor economist of the
University of Wisconsin in the 1930's, Prof. E. A. Ross who was one of
the leading advocates of exclusion of Orientals from the American labor
force. He was regarded as a great liberal at the time.

There was also the widely accepted doctrine of what was later to be
known as "Social Darwinism," to the effect that the white race
was the highest point of human evolution, and that yellow, brown, and
black people represented lower stages. Indeed, white people themselves
were divided into the "higher" North European -- "Nordic," "Aryan" --
and the "lower" South Europeans -- Slavs, Greeks, and Italians. The
fact that these ideas were widely believed to be scientific is all too
evident in the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which codified
these ideas into law, and which gave high immigration quotas to
British, Germans, and Scandinavians, lower quotas to Middle and South
Europeans, and total exclusion to the Japanese. The Chinese had already
been excluded in 1882.

Against this background of almost 100 years of successful anti-Oriental
agitation throughout California, it is easy to understand that the
attack on Pearl Harbor aroused in the people of California, as well as
elsewhere, all the superstitious, racist fears that had been
generated over the years, as well as the normal anxieties of wartime.
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was called "a stab in the back" --
a typical Oriental form of behavior.

It is difficult for people who did not live through that dreadful time
to reconstruct the terror and the anxiety felt by people along the
entire west coast. Disaster followed upon disaster after the attack on
Pearl Harbor. On that same day, December 7, 1941, Japanese forces
landed on the Malay Peninsula and began their drive toward
Singapore. Guam fell on December 10, Wake on December
23. On December 8 Japanese planes destroyed half the aircraft on the
airfields near Manila. As enemy troops closed in, General
MacArthur withdrew his forces from the Philippines and retired to
Australia. On Christmas day the British surrendered Hong Kong.

The Western World was scared stiff. The west coasts of the
United States, rich with naval bases, shipyards, oil fields, and
aircraft factories, seemed especially vulnerable to attack.

There was talk of evacuating not just the Japanese from the
west coast but everybody. Who knew what was going to happen next?

How frightening were the nightly blackouts during that bleak winter of
defeat. Would Japanese carriers come to bomb the cities -- San Diego,
San Francisco, Los Angeles? Would submarines sneak through the Golden
Gate to shell San Francisco? Would they actually mount an invasion? Who
could tell?

I moved to San Francisco in 1955. You could see along the shores of
Marin County the great remains of submarine nets that went
across the Golden Gate to catch Japanese submarines ion case they
started sneaking through the Golden Gate. That is how serious the fear
was.

War of course breeds fear of enemies within -- spies, saboteurs.
There were rumors that Japanese farmers in Hawaii had cut arrows in
their fields to direct Japanese fighter pilots to targets at Pearl
Harbor, and that west coast Japanese were equally organized to help the
enemy. Such rumors were later found to be totally without foundation,
but in the anxieties of the moment they were believed.

It was a field day for inflammatory journalists and newscasters:
Westbrook Pegler, John B. Hughes -- even Damon Runyon -- on the radio
every night, screaming these alarmist broadcasts about the dangers of
Japanese attack.

The columnist Henry McLemore wrote:

"Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in badlands...
Let us have no patience with the enemy or with any whose veins carry
his blood... Personally I hate the Japanese. That goes for all of them."

Again the popular hue and cry was backed up by reputable intellectuals.
Walter Lippmann, the dean of American social commentators then and for
decades thereafter, joined in the demand for mass evacuation.
The idea was also supported at the time by such liberal intellectual
journals as the Nation, the New Republic, and the extra-liberal but
short-lived New York newspaper, PM.

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066,
which set in motion the evacuation program. It applied to all Japanese,
citizens and noncitizens alike, in the three Western States and a
portion of Arizona. Altogether some 110,000 were relocated, of whom
more than 70,000 were American citizens by birth; the remainder were
not able to become citizens under the laws then prevailing.

Of course the relocation was unjust. But under the stress of
wartime anxieties and in the light of the long history of anti-Oriental
agitation in California and the West, I find it difficult to imagine
what else could have occurred that would not have been many times worse.
If things had continued to go badly for American forces in the Pacific
-- and they did -- what would Americans on the west coast have done to
their Japanese and Japanese American neighbors as they learned of more
American ships sunk, more American planes shot down, more American
servicemen killed, including your husband, your boyfriend, your
brothers? What would they have done? Would they have beaten
their Japanese neighbors in the streets? Would they have ostracized
and persecuted Japanese American children? Would mobs have
descended on Little Tokyo in Los Angeles and Japan town in San
Francisco to burn down shops and homes?

There was precedent for such behavior in California, especially
directed against the Chinese. The Chinese started wearing lapel pins
saying, "I am Chinese."

I recall a friend of mine, a Japanese American now living in Marin
County, who was 11 years old when the war broke out. She and her
parents were vastly relieved when they learned of their
evacuation from the west coast. Most of her generation and her
parent's generation welcomed the evacuation as a guarantee of their
personal safety.

The question is often asked why Germans and Italians were not
interned and why the Japanese in Hawaii were left alone.
The answer is simple. Germans and Italians were persecuted during World
War I, when they were fairly recent immigrants, but there were too many
of them to intern. However, "patriots" dumped garbage on the lawns of
German homes, and in some east coast cities, all the German books in
the public libraries were burned and courses in German language offered
in colleges and high school stopped. By the time of World War II, both
Germans and Italians were a well-established and familiar part of
American life. The same was true of the Japanese in Hawaii, who
were more than 20 percent of the population there and well known
and trusted. Besides, there were not enough ships to transport the
huge Japanese populations out of the major islands.

On the west coast of the American mainland, the situation was
different. The Japanese were a small fraction of the population of
California, Washington, and Oregon. The immigration of Japanese was
principally between the years 1900 to 1924; then it was stopped by law.
Japanese males, who constituted the first immigrants, married late in
life because they felt that they had to have a steady job before they
could send for a bride from Japan. Hence the typical Japanese American
family consisted of a father 20 years older than the mother,
and the average age of the Nisei, as the American-born Japanese
were called, at the time of Pearl Harbor, was 16.

This last statistic is of great importance in accounting for
the evacuation and internment.

If the average age of the American-born Japanese is 16, it means that the
average white adult official in California knew little or nothing about
the Japanese. He had not gone to school with Japanese children nor
visited their homes. He had not had Japanese friends on baseball or
debate teams. Furthermore, the Japanese parent generation spoke
little English or none at all. So the ruling classes, the people in
the city councils, the State assemblies, and so on, did not know who
the Japanese were. They did not know anything about them. So whatever
Westbrook Pegler said about them was likely to be true.

For most white Americans, especially those old enough to sit in
positions of authority, the Japanese were a strange and foreign
element, so almost anything could be believed about them.

For example, it was widely believed -- Japanese used to send their
children, after public school, to Japanese language schools -- it was
widely believed that the Japanese children going to Japanese language
schools were being taught reverence for the Emperor of Japan,
that they were being indoctrinated with Japanese patriotism.

This happened to be true. That is, many of the teachers who came over
in the 1930's were products of the superheated patriotism in Japan that
made it possible for Pearl Harbor to happen. However, it was not
possible at that time to predict that this indoctrination in emperor
worship would prove to be totally ineffective.

Incidentally, our distinguished colleague Daniel Inouye, as a
pupil in a Japanese language school in Hawaii before World War II,
kicked up a strenuous protest against the use of these schools to
preach Japanese nationalism -- and look what happened to him. He got
elected to the U.S. Senate.

The relocation centers in desert areas to which the Japanese were
assigned were, indeed, dreary places. However, the governing body of
the centers, the War Relocation Authority, was headed by the wise
and humane Dillon Myer, a midwesterner who, before his appointment,
had known almost nothing about the Japanese.

Being a firm believer in democracy and justice and knowing the people
in the camps had done nothing to deserve their internment, Mr. Myer
did everything possible to make life tolerable for the internees.
He encouraged camp self-government, hired teachers from outside to
continue the education of the children, sent WRA staff around the East
and Middle West to seek college admittance for Nisei who had graduated
from the camp high schools. One result was that many Nisei students
who, without enforced evacuation from the west coast, might have
stopped with a high school education to work in their father's shops or
farms, instead went on to college, including prestigious and
private institutions such as Antioch, Oberlin, and Mount Holyoke, as
well as to such great public institutions as Minnesota, Michigan,
Wisconsin, and Purdue.

A large number of young people -- middle-aged people by this time --
from very modest families got a college education which they
otherwise would never have if they had not been sent to relocation camp.

The officials of the staff of the WRA, with a few exceptions, were
deeply concerned about the injustice of the relocation program, eager
to restore the Japanese Americans, especially Nisei, to normal American
lives. They fanned out over the United States east of the Rockies
to seek employment for them. You must understand that the Japanese
Americans that were put into camps were only those who lived west of
the Rockies. If you lived east of the Rockies -- Salt Lake City,
Denver, Chicago -- they left you alone, because you were not considered
to be a military danger. I was living in Chicago, thank goodness.

They fanned out over the United States east of the Rockies to seek
employment for the internees. Everywhere the Japanese Americans went,
they impressed their employers by their industry and loyalty, so that
more were summoned from the camps -- scientists, teachers, mechanics,
food processors, agricultural workers. By the time the order excluding
Japanese from the west coast was rescinded on January 2, 1945, half
the internees had found new jobs and homes in mid-America and the East.

I emphasize this last point because the relocation centers were not
"concentration camps." The younger generation of Japanese Americans
love to call them concentration camps. Unlike the Nazis, who made the
term "concentration camp" a symbol of the ultimate in man's inhumanity
to man, the WRA officials worked hard to release their internees, not
to be sent to gas chambers, but to freedom, to useful jobs on the
outside world and to get their B.A. at Oberlin College.

By 1945, there were almost 2,500 Nisei and Issei in Chicago, a city
that was most hospitable to Japanese, and I myself found relatives I
did not know existed. Other Midwest and Eastern cities acquired
Japanese populations they did not know before the war: Minneapolis,
Cleveland, Cincinnati, New York, Madison, Wis., Des Moines, St. Louis,
and so on. And those who remained in camp in most cases did so
voluntarily. These were the older people, afraid of the outside
world, with the Nation still at war with Japan.

I point out these facts to emphasize the point that to call relocation
centers concentration camps, as is all too commonly done, is semantic
inflation of the most dishonest kind, an attempt to equate the
actions of the U.S. Government with the genocidal actions of the Nazis
against the Jews during the Hitler regime. As an American I protest
this calumny against the Nation I am proud to have served as an
educator and even prouder to serve as a legislator.

Now, the relocation center at Tule Lake, Calif., was different
from the others. It was there that those who resisted the evacuation
and internment, including a Japanese veteran of the U.S. Army in World
War I, a Nisei who renounced American citizenship in protest against
the relocation, and other angry people were sent to isolate them
from those who patiently accepted their internment. There were
frequent disturbances at Tule Lake.

The trouble-free lives at all the relocation centers other than Tule
Lake can be attributed to a cultural trait of the Japanese, clearly
seen in the Issei, that is, the older generation of immigrants, but
almost unheard of in their American-born grandchildren, and that is the
concept of gaman, which means endurance. Gaman is
to endure with patience and dignity -- especially dignity -- hardships,
misfortunes or injustices, especially those about which nothing can be
done.

I am sure there are some Americans who will be enraged at the
suggestion that anyone was happy in a relocation camp. But with the
concept of gaman, you learn to make the best of a tough
situation, endure with patience and dignity the situation you are in
and make the best of it.

The people in the relocation camps were shopkeepers, market gardeners,
farmers, laborers, all in relatively humble occupations, finding
themselves with 3 years of leisure on their hands.

As one elderly gentleman said recently, "That was the first time in my
life that I didn't have to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning to milk
the cows."

Finding themselves with some leisure in their lives, they took up art.
There was a tremendous artistic output. They turned out little
masterpieces of sculpture, flower arrangements, and ceramics and
painting, later memorialized in a scholarly volume entitled "Beauty
Behind Barbed Wire" by Allen Hendershott Eaton, 1952.

How else can one account for the elderly Japanese farmers and grocers
who gathered around a bridge table to go over the nagauta, a
traditional, long narrative song, and the music from the kabuki,
which is the Japanese equivalent of opera?

For many older Japanese, the relocation turned out to be a 3-year
release from unremitting work on farms and vegetable markets and
fishing boats, and they used this leisure to recover and relive the
glories of their traditional culture.

Now I come to the most important part of the story. It is the story
of the Nisei, the children of the older generation I have just been
talking about.

It was a great humiliation for the Nisei of the 100th Battalion
of the Hawaii National Guard to be sent to Camp McCoy, Wis., where they
were trained with wooden guns.

Spark Matsunaga, now a U.S. Senator from Hawaii, was in
that unit. He writes:

"We wrote home of our great desire for combat duty to
prove our loyalty to the United States. It was not known to us then
that our letters were being censored by higher authority. We learned
subsequently that because of the tenor of our letters, the War
Department decided to give us our chance. Our guns were returned to us,
and we were told that we were going to be prepared for combat duty...
Grown men leaped with joy."

On January 28, 1943, the War Department announced that Nisei would be
accepted as a special combat unit. They volunteered in the thousands,
both from Hawaii and from the relocation camps. They were united with
the 100th Battalion as the 442d Regimental Combat Team at Camp
Shelby, Miss.

The 100th Battalion first saw action at Salerno, Italy, in
September 1943, and took heavy casualties. The 442d landed in
Italy in June 1944, at once gained a reputation as an assault
force, and accomplished the famous rescue of the "lost battalion" of
the 36th (Texas) Division at an enormous cost in blood. Fighting in
seven major campaigns, the men of the 442d suffered 9,486 casualties
and won more than 18,000 individual decorations for valor.

Another 3,700 Nisei served in combat areas in the Pacific as
translators and interpreters. The Japanese military, believing their
language to be too difficult for foreigners to master, were careless
about security. They did not count on Nisei on every battlefront
reading captured documents and passing information on to Allied
commanders. Kibei, Nisei born in America but educated in Japan
and originally the object of special distrust, turned out to be
especially helpful in this respect.

They were born in America. They were American citizens, but they were
educated in Japan. They could read Japanese very well, so they were
very, very good for intelligence work.

In short, the Nisei covered themselves with honor and made life in
America better for themselves, their parents, who a few years after the
war won the right to be naturalized, and their children. I remember
vividly the returning Nisei veterans I saw in Chicago soon after V-E
Day. Short of stature as they were, they walked proudly, infantry
combat citations on their chests, conscious that they were home -- in
their own country. Chicago, known throughout the war for its
hospitality to servicemen, outdid itself when the Nisei returned. They
had earned that welcome.

The relocation was a heart-breaking experience for Japanese
Americans as well as a serious economic loss for those who had
spent decades of labor on their farms and businesses. But most
seriously it was an affront. America was saying to them, "You are not
to be trusted. You are Japs. We doubt your loyalty."

The Nisei, although very much Americanized, are in some respects
profoundly Japanese. An imputation of disloyalty, being an
affront, was also a challenge. A powerful Japanese motivation is "giri
to one's name" -- the duty to keep one's reputation -- and one's
family's -- unblemished. Giri is also duty to one's community, one's
employers, to one's nation. The Nisei's nation was the United States.
One accused of disloyalty is dutybound to remove that disgrace by
demonstrating himself to be loyal beyond all expectation.

This is a basic reason the Nisei volunteered in such numbers and fought
so well. More than 33,000 Nisei served in the war -- a
remarkable number out of a total Japanese American population -- Hawaii
and mainland combined -- of little more than 200,000. They had a fierce
pride in their reputation as a group.

The Nisei were also motivated by "giri to one's name." Those who found
jobs outside the camps were exemplary workers, as if to prove something
not only about themselves but about their entire group. Japanese
Americans, young and old alike, accepted mass relocation with dignity
and maturity, making the best of a humiliating situation. In so doing,
they exhibited the finest resources of their ancient background culture.

The prewar theory of white supremacy was completely discredited by the
crushing defeat of Hitler and Hitlerism. The prejudice against
Japanese in America was all but wiped out by the courage and the
sacrifice of Nisei service men in Italy and the Pacific. Then in
the 1960's came the civil rights movement, which further discredited
doctrines of racial superiority and inferiority. We live today in a
totally different era.

The Nisei, with their courage, and their parents, by their industry,
have won for Japanese Americans the admiration and respect of all
Americans. Japanese Americans have an average level of education higher
than any other ethnic group, including whites. They have a higher
representation in the learned professions -- medicine, law,
engineering, computer science -- than any other ethnic groups -- and in
this respect they are doing as well as another group famous for their
respect for learning -- namely, the Jews. The per capita income of
Japanese Americans is $500 a year above the national average. And they
have, with a population of little more than half a million, three
representatives in the U.S. Senate, while the blacks, with a population
approaching 23 million, have none. What more can Japanese Americans
want? We are living today at a time when Japanese Americans are
almost a privileged class, with their notorious scholastic aptitude,
their industriousness, and their team spirit in whatever occupation
they find themselves.

Mr. President, I am proud to be a Japanese American. But when a
small but vocal group of Japanese Americans calling themselves a
redress committee demand a cash indemnity of $25,000 for all those
who went to relocation camps during World War II, including those who
were infants at the time and those who are now dead, a total of some
two and three-quarters of a billion dollars -- we have been seeing this
in a series of articles being published in the Washington Post -- my
flesh crawls with shame and embarrassment.

Let me remind the Japanese American Redress Committee that we also live
in a time when American industry is seriously threatened by Japanese
competition -- in automobiles, steel, cameras, television, and radio
sets, tape recorders, and watches. I warn the Japanese Americans who
demand about $3 billion of financial redress for events of 41 years
ago from which nobody is suffering today, that their efforts can
only result in a backlash against both Japanese Americans and Japan.
And to make such a demand at a time of the budget stringencies of the
Reagan administration is unwise enough, but to make this demand
against the background of their own record as America's most successful
minority is simply to invite ridicule.

Let me remind the Japanese Americans that we are, as we say repeatedly
in our Pledge of Allegiance, "one nation," striving to achieve "liberty
and justice for all."

This means -- and I say this to black Americans and Mexican
Americans and all other ethnic political groups -- let us stop playing
ethnic politics to gain something for our own group at the expense
of all others. Let us continue to think of America as "one nation,
under God, indivisible" and let us act accordingly.